Daily Archives: February 27, 2013

Tennessee officials are floating a proposal to combine geography and history. This approach will supposedly “give students a deeper grasp of both subjects and free up more time for teaching language skills that are measured on standardized tests.” I would’ve assumed that shoehorning two subjects into one class would mean students would get a much shallower grasp, so I’m a little perplexed here.

Of course, my perplexity is beside the point, because this isn’t really about giving kids “a deeper grasp” of history and geography, is it? This is about marginalizing social studies to make way for math and language arts, because with the Common Core standards you live and you die by math and language scores on standardized tests.